Liberals gain strange new respect for pollster Scott Rasmussen

Not long ago, pollster Scott Rasmussen was subjected to mockery by liberals on a daily basis because his polls showed a tight presidential race whereas other polls showed President Barack Obama leading GOP nominee Mitt Romney by a substantial margin. Here’s Andrew Sullivan a couple of months ago in a post titled, “Living In Rasmussen-Land“:

If Drudge is flagging a poll, you know almost instantly who has provided it. But no one has more completely swallowed the Rasmussen world’s alternate reality than John Hinderaker. He acknowledges that in the Rasmussen poll, there are more Republicans in the sample than in most others. But he runs with it anyway. Romney is clearly winning the race, it seems.

The Rasmussen effect is best seen by using various polling models and removing Rasmussen data to see what happens. So Pollster.com’s data, including Rasmussen, currently shows a national tie at 46.1 percent. Removing Rasmussen makes it Obama 47 and Romney 45.7. Small – but in a race this tight, not trivial. I generally remove Rasmussen from the poll of polls, because they are so openly biased in their sample.

Up until a day or two ago, left-wing Twitter users strongly agreed with Sullivan’s assessment:

Rasmussen is so bad — Obama wins 46% of conservatives and Romney gets 54% percent of liberals in their new Ohio poll. LOL! #p2